Courtenay, a younger son who saddled himself with a large family, was described in 1815 by his former patron, Charles Long, as ‘one of those persons who will lose nothing for want of asking’.
It was as a junior clerk at the Treasury that Courtenay first came to the notice of Long, joint-secretary under Pitt. His friendship with William Dacres Adams, then a Home Office clerk and subsequently private secretary to Pitt and the Duke of Portland as prime ministers, was later strengthened by their marriages to the Mayow sisters. In September 1801 Courtenay told Adams that ‘whatsoever King may reign, I hope still to be "Vicar of Bray"’, but in July 1802 he was not sorry to see electoral evidence of the ’weakness’ of the Adington ministry, hoping that the consequence might be the eventual return to power of Pitt, though he admitted that these thoughts, heretical in a Treasury clerk, were basically provoked by ’a private motive’.
By September 1803 he was ’much in the confidence’ of Long and therefore able, so Adams thought, to anticipate obtaining ’something very and permanently advantageous’ when the Pittites returned to office. Shortly afterwards, on the strength of a recent ’sensible pamphlet’ on a financial question, he was chosen by Rose, Long and Pitt, who did not want anyone ’immediately connected’ with him to do the job, to act as Pitt’s standard-bearer in the current pamphlet war with government. His Plain answer, a defence of Pitt and Grenville against the attack made in A few cursory remarks upon the state of parties, for which he was supplied with materials and advice by Pitt and Long, was published later in the year.
On Pitt’s return to power in May 1804 he was rewarded with the agency for Ceylon.
For all this Courtenay, who attacked the government’s dealings with America in a series of letters to the Sun under the pseudonym of ’Decius’ between November 1807 and January 1808, and later in 1808 published Additional observations on the American treaty, remained dissatisfied and was constantly trying to improve his position. Long, who later claimed that Courtenay had ’had the modesty’ to ask him either to allow him to treat the deputy paymastership as a sinecure, or to make it permanent and lucrative, refused to abet these manoeuvres: ’though it is very true’, he reflected, ’that he has shown himself a warm partisan of Mr Pitt and his friends, yet he has been most amply rewarded for it’. While Courtenay remained nominally in possession of the cashiership until 1813 he evidently bartered it in some fashion to a protégé of Lord Lonsdale in about 1807. He was presumably compensated (Long said in 1810 that he received £600 a year from the Treasury in addition to his salaries), but in July 1810 he failed in his attempt to use the transaction as a means of putting pressure on Lonsdale to ’obtain for me a small appointment not depending upon political changes’: he had in mind, Long thought, the paymastership of Exchequer bills.
Courtenay did not give up easily and in the summer of 1811 Perceval offered him ’an efficient and difficult place’, apparently in Ireland, which Adams counselled him not to take ’with no more than £500 a year’. He had already been earmarked by Adam’s father to succeed him as Member for Totnes on the family interest at the next general election and his brother-in-law urged him to inform Perceval, ’as such a knowledge might possibly forward your present views’.
A staunch ministerialist from the outset, he made his maiden speech in defence of the droits of Admiralty, 21 Jan. 1812, protesting against ’the principle of having a mere stipendiary King’, but according to Brougham, the author of the critical motion, he ’broke down’ in the course of his speech.
On Liverpool’s confirmation in power he made an unsuccessful bid for the treasureship of the Ordnance, but in August 1812 he was appointed secretary of the Board of Control with a salary of £1,500, which by the 1820s had risen to £2,200 with a retirement annuity of £1,000. Shortly afterwards he arranged with Robert Willimott an exchange of his land tax post for the agency of the Cape, officially worth £600 a year but estimated to bring in £4,000 in practice. On 26 Sept. 1813, considering himself ’the fittest man in the party for the receipt of £4,000 per annum’, he staked a claim to the secretaryship of the Treasury currently held by the ailing Richard Wharton, but he did not obtain it when it fell vacant.
As an official man, Courtenay was an utterly reliable supporter of the Liverpool government for the rest of the period, though he voted steadfastly in favour of Catholic relief and in 1816, expressing doubts as to whether he could work under Canning at the Board of Control, claimed to be attached to Castlereagh ’personally rather than to the adminstration in general’.
Courtenay, described by Lord Ellenborough in 1829 as ’a man of undignified manners and appearance’ but ’certainly a clever man’, was an efficient if rather officious secretary to the Board of Control, where he provided an element of stability during his long tenure of the post. Liverpool had Canning’s authority for asserting in 1820 that ’no office ever had an individual more completely conversant with every detail belonging to it’.
He was drowned while bathing at Torquay, 8 July 1841.